Wednesday, November 16, 2011

"Explaining the Diminishing Returns to Non-STEM Higher Education"

As Generation Jobless tries to figure out where its job possibilities
went, we might consider possible relationships between higher education
and return on investment. I want to limit these possibilities to
graduates of four year institutions in non-STEM subjects, rather than
the important but separate issue of college non-completion rates.
Consider the following, noting that they are not incompatible with each
other as explanations of the relationship between liberal arts college
degrees and return on educational investment.

Demand for
liberal arts graduates has dried up, because of structural changes in
the broader economy that have reduced the need for these job categories.
The structural reasons range from greater automation of production in
lower-professional white collar positions; secular shifts downward in
the economy overall and a lower long-term growth rate. The overall
point is shifting demand in the overall labor market.

Labor
markets seek liberal arts graduates with skills in the traditional
subject matters of analytic skills in verbal and basic quantitative
areas, but higher education fails to teach those skills. The problem in
this case is not demand as such — assuming away the short and medium
term scarcity of jobs — but instead that the workers supplied lack the
necessary skills. The problem lies with what the university teaches or,
more exactly, fails to teach. Within non-STEM areas, colleges are not
teaching generalist analytic skills. The traditional promise of the
quality humanities or liberal arts major — not a technical skill set,
but generalist analytic skills in reading, writing, basic maths, and
strong communications skills — has somehow eroded and colleges fail to
convey those skills.

Colleges continue to supply liberal arts
graduates with the traditional skill set, and labor markets continue to
seek them — but the cost of college has simply gone far above the wages
that these skills and the associated jobs can bear. It’s not the skills
and it’s not the jobs, it’s the cost of education — priced as though
everyone would become a Wall Street banker or lawyer.

Specialization
in the university has reached the point where colleges cannot produce
the true generalists needed in the economy — traditional liberal arts
skills in analytic reading, writing, and communication, but combined
with generalist technical knowledge in areas of the modern economy —
STEM plus economics. STEM departments are not interested in educating
generalists, and traditional liberal arts departments assumes that the
purpose is to go on to graduate or professional school, hence the
exclusive focus on GPA, and grade inflation to try and maintain
enrollments.

Society is trying to put people through the higher
education, four year college system, who intellectually have no business
being there. Their future lies in blue collar work, not white collar
work. This is a popular meme at this moment, but it has two distinct
flavors. One is that there is significant population that, just because
of its bell curve placement, will never successfully become “knowledge
workers.” This would be so in good times or in bad, but is masked
during good times. This is to say that it would always be inefficient
and suboptimal to educate this group to white collar knowledge worker
jobs for which they are ill-suited....MORE